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Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

nautil.us

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Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#221

Post by xg15 »

crazygringo wrote: post #55

Hard disagree. Once you get to the advanced levels of any field, terminology being "accessible" doesn't really matter, but being precise does . Areas like philosophy and law actually suffer in my opinion when they overload common words with uncommon meanings, or descend into weird disambiguations that depend on suffixes. For example, in philosophy there's "contractarianism" and "contractualism", and trying to remembe…

> Once you get to the advanced levels of any field, terminology being "accessible" doesn't really matter, but being precise does.

If you really want to build knowledge barriers, then yes.

This might have been true decades ago when advanced academic concepts really might have been relevant for a small group of experts - but today, advanced math is the foundation of huge industries - and not everyone working with it can be assumed to have a formal education in the field: Often, you want to make use of an algorithm and simply need to know the concepts necessary to understand that algorithm.

Also, being precise doesn't have to mean being opaque - a name should give an uninformed reader at least enough information to roughly categorize the concept: Even "Timsort" is better than "Tim's algorithm", because this at least gives me a hint that I deal with a sorting algorithm.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#222

Post by quickthrower2 »

ardit33 wrote: post #155
chongli wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

for example: operating systems, programming languages, human computer interaction, etc. Those topics might seem to have nothing to do with math but all of their components have mathematical underpinnings. Algorithms, data structures, complexity theory, and even the physics of end-to-end latency, colour perception, etc. There probably are some people out there, working in these fields with only a high school math back…

It is like saying Chemistry is a subfield of math, because at some point they use numbers to describe things (mass and such).... It is not. Applied Computer Science has as much common with math as Chemistry does with math. I view theoretical computer science as mostly self-masturbatory, to the point that is very very divorced from real life applications and is benefiting very little to us. Also the market has spoken…

I wouldn’t use money as a measure of how useful something is. Useful for getting a job sure, but to society not so much.

The computer science that helps big companies get more control is the most useful by this metric. Oh look big data and AI are popular. Programming language theory to help create less buggy programs is less so.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#223

Post by Izkata »

m12k wrote: post #211
labster wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bloom filters prove OP’s point though. The first few times I heard the term, I wondered how a Photoshop filter to blur things could possibly apply to the problem. Maybe if it was called an exclusion filter it would be less jargony, I don’t know; naming things is hard.

I was telling a friend about Bloom filters and he'd never looked into them, because he'd assumed from the name that they were some kind of screen space shader.

For a long time I thought the algorithm or data structure used by it had some sort of metaphorical relationship to a flower blooming.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#225

Post by xigency »

Davidzheng wrote: post #161
kxyvr wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a counterpoint, I've a Ph.D in math and I largely agree with the article. Frankly, it's difficult enough to keep track of the names in my own field much less interact with people in other fields who would greatly benefit from these results if they were comprehensible. While I agree that precision is necessary, is it really that hard to say something like a complete inner product space vs a Hilbert space? Should we…

If you have to write complete inner product space a hundred times in an article that's pretty annoying tbh

Terrible excuse. Things are read much more than they are written. That’s like using short variable names rather than descriptive ones as they are easier to type. With current IDEs that isn’t even the case and I’m sure word processors could use the same autocomplete. Every writing shortcut adds cognitive load for the reader to remember.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#226

Post by znpy »

Laakeri wrote: post #125
chongli wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in Computer Science we have things like: "Quick Sort", "Merge Sort", "Map", "Hashtable", "LRU", etc... Those are trivial concepts though. The article brings up "perfectoid spaces", as if to suggest their superiority to "Scholze spaces", yet neither name gives any clue as to what they are: In mathematics, perfectoid spaces are adic spaces of special kind, which occur in the study of problems of "mixed characteristic",…

Computer science is not a subfield of math. Theoretical computer science is, but there is a lot more to cs than just tcs, for example: operating systems, programming languages, human computer interaction, etc. I agree on your first point though, I think the concepts named after people are usually so abstract that the hard part is to really understand the concepts, not to remember the name.

> Computer science is not a subfield of math.

I wonder what Alan Turing would say about this.

On more serious note... Most people confuse software engineering with computer science.

Computer science is a branch of mathematics, software engineering might not be.

Oh and by the way, there's a bunch of mathematics and logic (again, a branch or mathematics) into language recognition and compilers...

Edit: think that many prominent computer scientists were/are mathematicians: think of Donald Knuth or Claude Shannon, for example. They laid the ground for other stuff to happen.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#227

Post by Izkata »

dlubarov wrote: post #210
amw-zero wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All of the important ideas in all of the fields that you mentioned have an absolute foundation in math. Just because we are able to work without using math everyday does not reduce the relevance of math to programming at all. Programming is math. I’m not sure why this bothers people so much. When you cross a bridge and it’s able to keep standing, you don’t feel gratitude to math? When you write any program, you shoul…

Is baseball also a subfield of math? The problem of swinging the bat can be reduced to physiology, which can be reduced to physics, and then to math. (Sorry for the snarkiness -- reductio ad absurdum just seems like the easiest way to argue this point.)

As so often happens: https://xkcd.com/435/

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#228

Post by bsza »

DonCopal wrote: post #203
bsza wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are names for products though, not programming concepts. A more accurate analogy would be calling a class a Kay template or calling a for loop a Lovelace construct. And it's great that we don't do that.

We do have Shor's algorithm, Deutsch-Jozsa algorithm etc.

Who is "we"? Both Shor and Jozsa are mathematicians and Deutsch is a physicist.

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#229

Post by boomboomsubban »

dvt wrote: post #86
didibus wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree. And when using common terms, people also make all kind of assumptions from it, and that comes with a bias, before even getting a grasp of the concept it describes in a given field.

Going to pile on to the agreement here -- for example, much confusion can be had when discussing things like "intentionality" with laypeople. Philosophy is riddled with regular words that take non-regular meanings. It might make philosophers feel smart, but it's a detriment to the field imo.

Much, though not all, of this is due to philosophers discussing ideas from the past three thousand years originally in a multitude of languages. How should one discuss a "Platonic Idea" without confusion of a general idea?

Re: Mathematicians should stop naming things after each other

#230

Post by dtwhitney »

crazygringo wrote: post #55

Hard disagree. Once you get to the advanced levels of any field, terminology being "accessible" doesn't really matter, but being precise does . Areas like philosophy and law actually suffer in my opinion when they overload common words with uncommon meanings, or descend into weird disambiguations that depend on suffixes. For example, in philosophy there's "contractarianism" and "contractualism", and trying to remembe…

I'm with you on the "Hard disagree", but I'd say something like: one of the great rewards to being a Mathematician is that things are named after you, and you get that legacy. God knows the pay ain't great.
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